Randall Jarrell called this poem a subtle description of how “wisdom of this world… demonstrates to us that the wisdom of this world isn’t enough.” There’s no level of material success or social status — nor is there a level of knowledge about either — that will save you from the brute realities of life.

Writing about “Provide, Provide” in his book Modernist Quartet, Frank Lentricchia observes that,

The entire tone and manner is that of the public poet speaking to his democratic culture. The diction is appropriately drawn from the accessible middle level, with the exception of “boughten,” a regionalist trace of the authentic life, meaning “store-bought” as opposed to “homemade,” the real thing as opposed to the commodified version; no major problem if the subject is ice cream or bread, but with “boughten friendship” we step into an ugly world. The bardic voice speaks, but now in mock-directives (“Die early and avoid the fate,” “Make the whole stock exchange your own”), counseling the value of money and power; how they command fear; how fear commands, at a minimum, a sham of decency from others (better that than the authenticity of their meanness). Genuine knowledge? Sincerity? Devices only in the Hollywood of everyday life. Try them, they might work.

Robert Frost doesn’t mince words and refuses to whitewash the hard realities of life. The world & nature are essentially unconcerned about human welfare or wellbeing. The onus to provide for oneself squarely lies on one’s own self come what may, under all circumstances. Morals and ethics may fail to garner support or friendship for oneself in the end.

Terrifying? Yes and no. Superficially yes, actually not. Nowhere does Frost want you to show your back and run away. The poet neither suggests escapism nor a cowardly exit from this world. Rather, there is a clear cut call to gird up your loins and provide provide, whatever the circumstances, whatever the situation to the best of your ability.

Like this:

Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last long aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question ‘Whither?’

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

The photograph was taken several days ago, on the road leading from my family’s ranch.

Below are excerpts from Frosts’s 1960 interview with the Paris Review. In it, the 85-year-old Frost reflects on the methodology of writing and coolly relates some personal anecdotes, including an instance where he was subdued in a Paris restaurant by a jujitsu-wielding Ezra Pound. At the end of the interview, there’s also a cryptic mention of a poet out of California who has recently sent him a manuscript entitled Howl. We cannot know whether Frost had read the work, or whether it was even Ginsberg’s famed freshman collection, but it’s interesting to speculate what the weathered man of letters would have thought of the obscenity-laced work of the soon-to-be Beatnik icon.

Interviewer: When you started to write poetry, was there any poet that you admired very much?

Frost: I was the enemy of that theory, that idea of Stevenson’s that you should play the sedulous ape to anybody. That did more harm to American education than anything ever got out.

Did you ever feel any affinity between your work and any other poet’s?

I’ll leave that for somebody else to tell me. I wouldn’t know.

You’ve never, I take it then, been aware of any particular line of preference in your reading?

Oh, I read ‘em all. One of my points of departure is an anthology. I find a poet I admire, and I think, well, there must be a lot to that. Some old one—Shirley, for instance, “The glories of our blood and state”—that sort of splendid poem. I go looking for more. Nothing. Just a couple like that and that’s all. I remember certain boys took an interest in certain poems with me in old times. I remember Brower one day in somebody else’s class when he was a student at Amherst—Reuben Brower, afterwards the Master of Adams House at Harvard. I remember I said, “Anyone want to read that poem to me?” It was “In going to my naked bed as one that would have slept,” Edwards’s old poem. He read it so well I said, “I give you A for life.” And that’s the way we joke with each other. I never had him regularly in a class of mine. I visited other classes up at Amherst and noticed him very early. Goodness sake, the way his voice fell into those lines, the natural way he did that very difficult poem with that old quotation—“The falling out of faithful friends is the renewing of love.” I’m very catholic, that’s about all you can say. I’ve hunted. I’m not thorough like the people educated in Germany in the old days. I’ve none of that. I hate the idea that you ought to read the whole of anybody. But I’ve done a lot of looking sometimes, read quite a lot.

When you were in England did you find yourself reading the kind of poetry Pound was reading?

No. Pound was reading the troubadours.

Was there much bohemia to see at that time?

More than I had ever seen. I’d never had any. He’d take me to restaurants and things. Showed me jujitsu in a restaurant. Threw me over his head.

Did he do that?

Wasn’t ready for him at all. I was just as strong as he was. He said, “I’ll show you, I’ll show you. Stand up.” So I stood up, gave him my hand. He grabbed my wrist, tipped over backwards and threw me over his head.

How did you like that?

Oh, it was all right. Everybody in the restaurant stood up.

Did you feel when you left London to go live on a farm in Gloucestershire that you were making a choice against the kind of literary society you’d found in the city?

No, my choices had been not connected with my going to England even. My choice was almost unconscious in those days. I didn’t know whether I had any position in the world at all, and I wasn’t choosing positions. You see, my instinct was not to belong to any gang, and my instinct was against being confused with the—what do you call them?—they called themselves Georgians, Edwardians, something like that, the people Edward Marsh was interested in. I understand that he speaks of me in his book, but I never saw him.

Was there much of a gang feeling among the literary people you knew in London?

Yes. Oh, yes. Funny over there. I suppose it’s the same over here. I don’t know. I don’t “belong” here. But they’d say, “Oh, he’s that fellow that writes about homely things for that crowd, for those people. Have you anybody like that in America?” As if it were set, you know. Like Masefield—they didn’t know Masefield in this gang, but, “Oh, he’s that fellow that does this thing, I believe, for that crowd.”

Didn’t you teach Latin at one time?

Yes. When I came back to college after running away, I thought I could stand it if I stuck to Greek and Latin and philosophy. That’s all I did those years.

Did you read much in the Romantic poets? Wordsworth, in particular?

No, you couldn’t pin me there. Oh, I read all sorts of things. I said to some Catholic priests the other day when they asked me about reading, I said, “If you understand the word ‘catholic,’ I was very catholic in my taste.”

How old were you then?

Oh, just after I’d run away from Dartmouth, along there in ’93, ’4, twenty years old. Every time I’d get sick of the city I’d go out for the springtime and take school for one term. I did that I think two or three times, that same school. Little school with twelve children, about a dozen children, all barefooted. I did newspaper work in Lawrence, too. I followed my father and mother in that, you know. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with myself to earn a living. Taught a little, worked on a paper a little, worked on farms a little, that was my own departure. But I just followed my parents in newspaper work. I edited a paper a while—a weekly paper—and then I was on a regular paper. I see its name still up there in Lawrence.

While we’re thinking about science and literature, I wonder if you have any reaction to the fact that Massachusetts Institute of Technology is beginning to offer a number of courses in literature?

I think they’d better tend to their higher mathematics and higher science. Pure science. They know I think that. I don’t mean to criticize them too much. But you see it’s like this: the greatest adventure of man is science, the adventure of penetrating into matter, into the material universe. But the adventure is our property, a human property, and the best description of us is the humanities. Maybe the scientists wanted to remind their students that the humanities describe you who are adventuring into science, and science adds very little to that description of you, a little tiny bit. Maybe in psychology, or in something like that, but it’s awful little. And so, the scientists to remind their students of all this give them half their time over there in the humanities now. And that seems a little unnecessary. They’re worried about us and the pure sciences all the time. They’d better get as far as they can into their own subject. I was over there at the beginning of this and expressed my little doubts about it. I was there with Compton [Karl Compton, president of MIT, 1930-1948] one night—he was sitting on the platform beside me. “We’ve been short”—I turned to him before the audience—”we’ve been a little short in pure science, haven’t we?” He said, “Perhaps—I’m afraid we may have been.” I said, “I think that better be tended to.” That’s years ago.

Like this:

“When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.

The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state. The great artist is thus a solitary figure. He has, as Frost said, a lover’s quarrel with the world. In pursuing his perceptions of reality, he must often sail against the currents of his time. This is not a popular role. If Robert Frost was much honored in his lifetime, it was because a good many preferred to ignore his darker truths. Yet in retrospect, we see how the artist’s fidelity has strengthened the fibre of our national life.

If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. And as Mr. MacLeish once remarked of poets, there is nothing worse for our trade than to be in style. In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society — in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost’s hired man, the fate of having ‘nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.’

I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future…

I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world not only for its strength but for its civilization as well.”

In this speech, Kennedy emphasized the essential place of art — and specifically poetry — in democratic society, paving the way for the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act, which was signed into law two years later by President Johnson, creating The National Endowment for the Arts.

“I opened my eyes — and all the sea was ice-nine. The moist green earth was a blue-white pearl. The sky darkened. The sun, became a sickly yellow ball, tiny and cruel…

There were no smells. There was no movement. Every step I took made a gravelly squeak in blue-white frost. And every squeak was echoed loudly. The season of locking was over. The earth was locked up tight. It was winter, now and forever. I helped Mona out of our hole.
She shook her head and sighed. ‘A very bad mother.’
‘What?’
‘Mother Earth–she isn’t a very good mother any more.’

‘Hello? Hello?’ I called through the palace ruins. The awesome winds had torn canyons through that great stone pile. Mona and I made a half-hearted search for survivors — half-hearted because we could sense no life. Not even a nibbling, twinkle-nosed rat had survived. The arch of the palace gate was the only man-made form untouched. Mona and I went to it. Written at its base in white paint was a Calypso. The lettering was neat. It was new. It was proof that someone else had survived the winds. The Calypso was this:

Someday, someday, this crazy world will have to end,
And our God will take things back that He to us did lend.
And if, on that sad day, you want to scold our God,
Why go right ahead and scold Him. He’ll just smile and nod.”

The substance “ice-nine” remains a mystery for most of the novel. Midway through the story, however, you find out that it’s a revolutionary scientific discovery — a form of frozen water which is stable at room temperature and which causes all liquid water it touches to take the same properties. Ice-nine eventually winds up in the hands of a dictator, and, not to leave you on the edge of your seat, the world ends.

So the scene above is of the earth’s ending. And the quiet, frozen apocalypse over a tundra-of-an-ocean, brings to mind Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice”:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Moreover, the cold truth that the world is something which is not ours to own, but rather borrowed — “that He to us did lend” — is echoed in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which describes a similarly haunting post-apocalyptic scene. “[The father] walked out into the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of an intestate earth. Darkness implacable…Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”

__________

My thoughts are with my friends along the East Coast who are now braving nature’s bad side. Stay safe.